We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Wednesday, April 15. 2015

I have posted about IQ in the past. It's said to be a measure of "g", which is not much different than saying IQ is a measure of IQ.

IQ and total SAT scores are well-correlated so, at the least, it says something about one's power to handle relatively, but not extremely, complex cognitive tasks like higher math, challenging reading, high-level abstractions, etc. etc. It's about cognitive potential more than anything else. In today's world, cognitive powers matter more than they used to and more than they should, I suppose.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists have learned over the years to estimate peoples' IQs quite accurately, just in conversation. Subtlety of mind, rigor of logic, and curiosity as manifested by breadth and depth of knowledge are some of the markers. Of course, there is the birds of a feather issue too: people tend to find others within a similar range most engaging.

Very high IQ is a life handicap, sad to say. There are few of those, though. Lower IQs which are fully-functional and effective in life are far more common.

Medium-range IQ is the most life-adaptive (ie 110-115) for 95% of things in life from plumbing to software sales to money management. It's often been reported that the ideal IQ for CEOs of large, intricate organizations is near or around 130. Of course, character, personality style, sense of humor, and ability to connect with others in a positive way play perhaps larger overall roles in life although they will not help you perform, or even understand, a regression analysis. Furthermore, even moderately alert managers can easily hire brighter people to carry their water and make them look good. We call that "savvy" or "street smarts," not intelligence.

...a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions.

Problem with IQ is that it's not constant, and doesn't translate between countries/cultural areas, or in time.

Someone can have an IQ test (especially the ones used in "performance assessment centers" to "gauge" whether someone is "suitable for the job") come out really low, just because his brain doesn't work the way the test maker was testing for. Or because he as a bad day, if he'd taken the test a week later he'd have scored 20 points higher.

And of course the standardised tests are adjusted in both time and space to keep the average score at roughly 100 all over the world and through time.
Which means that if there's a lot of immigration into a country and the tests get rewritten to make those immigrants score better than they would on the old tests, the locals probably end up scoring lower.

In the end it's just a number that gives some indication of how good someone is in relation to others in the same group when it come to test taking.

Still remember getting an IQ test myself (a standardised one) as a child. The psychologist administering it despaired when I answered him on his question what I saw in the rorschach blobs and I told him I saw ink blobs.

they did ink blobs in the same session. Maybe not part of the test, but administered by the same people in the same room at the same time...

Came out in the 120s somewhere, don't remember the exact number, but was more than enough to convince the school and everyone else that my low grades weren't because of "mental retardation". Which was true, they were because my eyes were seriously bad and I consistently misread the test questions the teachers wrote on the blackboard.
Set of glasses, moved me to a position further in front of the classroom, problem solved, top of the class in math, geo, reading comprehension, history, and everything else except sports and social skills :)

Worst rule ever at my son's elementary school: you could only choose books off the shelf that were marked for your grade level. (not your reading level, mind you, but grade level!)

Used to drive me BATTY. My son was forced to pick out books to read at the library that he had no interest in b/c they were too easy. After I helped out one day during a book sale, I realized the school librarian was just LAZY and didn't really even like her job or the kids.

I always wondered what the bad thing was that would happen if they let us read the books that were supposedly too "old" for us. In some cases, I'm sure they were worried about corrupting content. To this day I can't imagine why a librarian thought I needed to be protected from Rudyard Kipling's "Kim."

Dr. B is correct on both points, JTW. Plus, IQ is constant and crosses countries, time, and cultural areas quite clearly. There is a Flynn Effect, which is an interesting bit of study, but otherwise your claims about how the tests are modified is inaccurate.

I disagreed with polymatharchives in his comment section. Summary: the evidence that there is an increasing downturn in life-outcomes above IQ140 isn't that good; it may be so, but the usual evidence has flaws. In particular, Grady Towers "The Outsiders" and his main example Billy Sidis collapse as evidence. I wrote about that (enter "sidis" in my AVI search bar) long after Grady had died. We were in Prometheus together in the 80's and I was fond of him. He came to a sad end.

As for educating the gifted, we do keep hoping that something will pan out as an improvement, but it remains true that most geniuses are autodidacts. Perhaps that is necessary, and at least allowing that would do them some good.

As for educating the gifted, we do keep hoping that something will pan out as an improvement, but it remains true that most geniuses are autodidacts. Perhaps that is necessary, and at least allowing that would do them some good.

There has been a trend in the last 50 years to have more structured programs for the gifted: more magnet schools, more AP courses and more AP exams passed. One consequence of this is that while the gifted will acquire more skills and knowledge as a result, they will have less time to do their own exploring. I am reminded of a conversation I had with my father back in the 60s, perhaps as a consequence of a bad experience I was having with an AP course. My father told me that with more rigorous courses in school, there is less possibility for pursuing your own off-course interests. This trend was apparent in comparing his childhood in the 30's to my childhood in the 60's, and the trend has continued. My father spoke as someone who had turned his childhood hobby into a profession- a profession where he had done very well.

When looking at my primary and secondary education, my conclusion is that there is no easy answer. In my primary education, I was to a large degree an autodidact. A large part of my education came from free range reading after school, but I still paid attention during class.

At the regional secondary school I attended, I greatly resented that because my primary school had a "one size fits all" approach, I was a year behind my intellectual peers in math and foreign languages, because they had taken first year high school math and foreign language in junior high in their town, and I had not. But ultimately that made no difference. I got my engineering degree. I became fluent in Spanish, and used my fluency to work in Latin America.

From my high school experience, my conclusion is that the educational experiences for gifted/upper level in high school are highly dependent on what programs are in place. Autodidact doesn't work as well when you have a lot of homework to do, and you want to have a good grade.

The upper level math program my high school had - a New Math approach- was an excellent fit for the top eighth or so of students, but not so good for the second eighth of students. My 9th grade math teacher was an incompetent teacher, although a Phi Beta Kappa Math graduate from a flagship state university. She knew her subject, but was not a good classroom manager. The book was so good that I taught myself- and developed a love of math that I didn't have in primary school.

For a less positive experience in gifted/upper level in high school, I present my AP Humanities course. The History teacher in that course taught American History, but didn't have the knowledge base to teach an AP World History course. Nor did he want to stay up 'till midnight to refresh his knowledge. [Nor would I.] I found it very demoralizing to have this teacher tell me to work my ass off when it was readily apparent that he was slacking off- in contrast to the other teachers in the course, who presented well-informed, well-organized lectures. Word got out about the teacher: the AP Humanities class got cancelled the next year because so few signed up for it.

Why the different reactions to incompetent teachers? When an incompetent teacher requires a lot of work- the difference between a 9th grade course and a 12th grade AP course- it is more difficult to overcome an incompetent teacher. Second: when you have an incompetent teacher, and you are left on your own to learn the material, you have to get by on your inherent abilities. I found out that I had more inherent ability in math than in history. Before 9th grade, I was planning to be a historian.

Success in college is highly dependent on self-motivation, on teaching yourself. Most STEM lectures are not understood without going over the material yourself before and/or after the lecture. My engineering program required 60 + hours of classroom plus study. Granted there are a select few who do not need that , but they are a select few. The unmotivated cannot survive.

And the work I currently do, involving the creation and maintenance of large databases, is work I taught myself while working for a startup. As long as I could keep producing stuff, the startup's boss tolerated my learning on the job.

It ultimately comes down to teaching yourself. [No, I am not a genius.]

When I was in school, I was measured at the 140 (maladjusted) level IQ. Looking back, I know that I had a hard time fitting in with the other students in my class, I was more serious and literal.

I attributed that to either my own failings or a failing of my parent's, figuring they'd created a stressful environment, and yet I couldn't clarify in what way they'd failed me. I just knew I didn't fit in.

But, maybe there was just a poor fit between my classmates interests and aptitudes and mine. That seems to resonate with how I felt about them, and maybe it makes sense. I wish I'd considered that possibility back then.

In other words, a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions. This benefits neither the excluded group nor society in general. For society, it is a horrendous waste of a very valuable resource. For the high IQ person it is a personal tragedy commonly resulting in unrealized social, educational and productive potential.

this is a fetish about one measure of compentcy.

no one is being excluded because they have high IQ. is IQ ever on any job application or been the subject of any interview?

if an applicant wasn't appointed judge or senior surgeon guy at the hospital its probably because he or she doesn't have an even more important skill set, like personality or ability to inveigle or lead. here (for the most part), the only thing important is what you do rather than who you are.

"Over an extensive range of studies and with remarkable consistency, from Physicians to Professors to CEOs, the mean IQ of intellectually elite professions is about 125 and the standard deviationn is about 6.5.

For example, Gibson and Light found that 148 members of the Cambridge University faculty had a mean IQ of 126 with a standard deviation of 6.3. The highest score was 139. J.D. Matarazzo and S.G. Goldstein found that the mean IQ of 80 medical students was 125 with a standard deviation of about 6.7. There was one outlier at 149, but the next highest score was 138. This means that 95% of people in intellectually elite professions have IQs between 112 and 138."

So the sweet spot for worldly success seems to be an IQ of about 125, with an IQ of 140 and above being detrimental apparently because people have difficulty understanding how you think.

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